Warner Bros. Records Wooed Guided By Voices with Chinese Food, Failed

In an excerpt from Experienced: Rock Music Tales of Fact and Fiction, a 16 story fiction and non-fiction anthology about touring bands, writer and former Guided By Voices member James Greer recounts the story of the band coming to New York City in 1994 to greet record labels vying for Alien Lanes. Greer, posting the tidbit on his blog, writes that free food must have been the “oblique” strategy of Warner Brothers, but no amount of room service, coupled with an uncomfortable trip to a gourmet Chinese restaurant, could make up for a Warner Brothers’ rep accidentally insulting Robert Pollard in the meeting. Explaining why the non-monetary bribery was necessary to begin with, Greer writes:

Upshot: there was some weird kind of non-compete clause between Matador and Warner Bros., so the latter could not woo us with money. What, then? Booze, cocaine, hookers? Please. There is not enough booze in the world to bribe Guided By Voices, we have mostly drunk it all already, and the rest is for pussies.

Apparently the Warner Brothers publicity executive made a bad joke to Pollard about a defective Alien Lanes tape sounding like “mud,” which didn’t really go over too well, as Pollard thought the exec was referring to the recording itself. Warner Brothers then took the band to a Chinese restaurant “which took (it seemed like) four hours to drive to, and eight hours back.” Greer also briefly described the beginnings of a clothed hot-tub session (and the fact that Robert Pollard was convinced they were going to hell), but ended the sneak peek after that.

It looks like you’ll eventually have to fork over $10.39 to find out how the rest went, but it’s a good thing I’d rather spend $10 reading about Robert Pollard’s drunken antics than providing for my own far less interesting, far less self-destructive inebriation any day.